Beauty is a strange place with a long, dramatic history that stretches back to colonial America. It was founded in the late 1600s by a man named Zebadiah Summers, who helped King Charles III of England “purchase” the “goodly” waterfront land here from two warring New England tribes, the Narragansetts and Pequots. A large quarry of high-grade marble at the edge of town made the English settlers stinking rich. And the postcard-blue harbor—which stretches beyond our U-Haul windshield as Mom drives the curving main road around the coast—later attracted other members of New England high society, who built their summer homes here in the 1800s and helped make this one of the most affluent communities in Rhode Island.

Being a harbor town, Beauty has a lot of boating action. A private yacht club. Racing cups. Boating festivals … A public pedestrian path called the Harborwalk circles the water for several miles, and if you like sandy beaches and saltwater taffy, you’ll find that here too.

But it’s the kooky parts of Beauty that I like. Things like that the town nickname since the 1920s has been—no lie—“Clam Town,” because it has more fried clam shacks per capita than any other New England town. (Suck it, Providence!) Or that a slightly famous gothic nineteenth century American poet lived here and is now buried in Eternal Beauty Burial Grounds, a historical cemetery—and here’s the weird part—inside the grave of one of the original female colonists who was found to not be a witch when she drowned in one of those “if she floats, she’s a witch” tests given by Beauty’s early paranoid townspeople.

Graveyards and clam shacks aside, the beating heart of Beauty is its historic harbor district. Hazy childhood memories surface in the setting sun as Mom drives us past a horse-drawn carriage trotting alongside gas streetlamps. I crack my window and breathe in the familiar briny air. Along Goodly Pier, sailboats bob in their winter moors, and tourist shops along the waterfront begin closing up. Glassblowers and candlemakers sit across from a row of gated historical mansions, some of which are occupied by families whose kids go to Ivy League schools.

It’s another world here. A strange mix of money and weird.

We make our way to the southern side of the harbor, down a one-way street still paved with eighteenth-century granite setts. The South Harbor is the working- to middle-class side of town. It’s pretty here. Quiet. A few shops. Waterfront warehouses. But Mom parks the U-Haul in front of the best thing in the South Harbor.

The Saint-Martin family business.

SIREN’S BOOK NOOK

OLDEST INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE IN THE SMALLEST STATE.